Felt that this review incorrectly criticized the series on aging too poorly, when it visually looks on par, if not better than series like Gundam, Daitarn 3, Daimos, Daltanious, God Sigma, Votoms..etc. of similar era. I can understand some may not like the drawing style or mech design out of personal taste, but that doesn't mean its poorly made. Not to mention the new animation footage in the movies are not just 'a little' better. They are very well animated and high budget production for its time. Another thing I noticed is that the review didn't put into account of what the super robot genre was at that time. Ideon broke a lot of grounds and super robot clichés by not having formulaic and predictable story patterns, generic likeable hero as the main antagonists, or super skillful or special powered main pilot. Instead, we get an ensemble cast of flawed characters that were very fresh at the time, and a very unique and ambiguous Ide energy as the story backdrop. Even the great soundtrack got so little credit from this review, as being labeled "Bad". The sound editing may not be the best, as some tracks did feel out of place at times in some episodes. But the music itself is far from bad, and have some very memorable and emotional tunes in old school mecha anime. Ideon as a series may have some rough edges, but it deserves more credit than this, and can't be criticized unfairly with our 21st century modern anime glasses.
To be honest, it's kind of startling how much Evangelion unintentionally repeats Ideon. A tv series with its run cut short, followed by two movies, one a recap, and the other a complete different take on a rushed ending. Not to mention how much of a big fan of Ideon Anno is.
original gundam ran from 79 to 80 and space runaway ran from 80 to 81, so coming after and being created by Tomino it draw's a lot of inspiration from gundam, most predominantly one of my favorite references to gundam in ideon is in some episodes Haro make's a few cameos
Somebody did an Ideon review! Haha. I've always wanted to watch this but I have to be in the mood to watch retro, retro. And by the way - The guy who did the music for this show would later do the music for the Dragon Quest Games. The more you know.
its cool, i intentionally mentioned it as an alternative for those who were curious but not dedicated enough to sit through the whole series because it is something that should be experienced and i think both movies together would work for that purpose
i agree with you, but i know there are alot of people out there that wouldnt give this a chance due to its dated animation and pacing issues. for them i would recommend the movies as a way of experiencing the basics of the story but for more dedicated anime fans id recommend to watch the whole series because some of my favorite parts are missing from the movie
You're right bob, the pacing is too slow and sometimes the episodes feels like it is repeating the same formula of cat and mouse. I feel a lot of the supporting characters were poorly developed. Luckily there is the Be Invoked movie. After watching this it really does reminds me how it really inspired the End of Eva movie. Thanks for your review. It helped to introduce this series to me. :)
I dont really think that the animation aged poorly. This quality is about the same as the original mobile suit gundam, given that ideon came out shortly after. I'm pretty sure people have a higher standard for 80's animation because Macross raised the bar.
The pacing is sooo slow. The plot barely gets anywhere for the first 10 episodes. episode 1 *The buff clan is attacking the protagonists!* episode 10 *The buff clan is still attacking the protagonists!* It's also inconsistent with how strong the mech is. A tactical nuke barely scratched it but a bunch of bugs almost obliterated it.
Damn...someone already beat me to the hair growing back joke! Surprised to know this came out in 1980, it looks really outdated even for 80's standards!
I liked the art style and I thought Ideon had a lot of beautiful scenes but Shin-getter's release was encoded from some really bad bootleg DVDs that used an old LD master and Shin-getter themselves didn't do too swell of a job either resulting in the video being very bitrate starved, the backgrounds being absent of any detail and the colors being totally desaturated. Their translation was pretty poor as well since the "translator" only managed to haphazardly stumble through the series by some minor miracle because he found transcripts for all of the episodes at a convention. I'm not overly critical though since he (probably correctly) assumed that nobody else would ever do it and wanted to make it at least somewhat watchable for English speakers. And there still aren't any other 1980 mecha series (Baldios, God Sigma, Trider G7, Shin Tetsujin) with subtitles so I doubt you've seen any of them to really make a judgement like "dated for 1980."
Felt that this review incorrectly criticized the series on aging too poorly, when it visually looks on par, if not better than series like Gundam, Daitarn 3, Daimos, Daltanious, God Sigma, Votoms..etc. of similar era. I can understand some may not like the drawing style or mech design out of personal taste, but that doesn't mean its poorly made. Not to mention the new animation footage in the movies are not just 'a little' better. They are very well animated and high budget production for its time. Another thing I noticed is that the review didn't put into account of what the super robot genre was at that time. Ideon broke a lot of grounds and super robot clichés by not having formulaic and predictable story patterns, generic likeable hero as the main antagonists, or super skillful or special powered main pilot. Instead, we get an ensemble cast of flawed characters that were very fresh at the time, and a very unique and ambiguous Ide energy as the story backdrop. Even the great soundtrack got so little credit from this review, as being labeled "Bad". The sound editing may not be the best, as some tracks did feel out of place at times in some episodes. But the music itself is far from bad, and have some very memorable and emotional tunes in old school mecha anime. Ideon as a series may have some rough edges, but it deserves more credit than this, and can't be criticized unfairly with our 21st century modern anime glasses.
In my opinion the Be Invoked movie is a must watch and is the best part of the entire series.
To be honest, it's kind of startling how much Evangelion unintentionally repeats Ideon.
A tv series with its run cut short, followed by two movies, one a recap, and the other a complete different take on a rushed ending.
Not to mention how much of a big fan of Ideon Anno is.
almost like he did it intentionally
I'm surprised to hear so many negative things about this show, considering its Uberhikari's favourite anime.
all of the positive things i say about it are the plot which was great but it had other problems which caused me to lower the overall score.
original gundam ran from 79 to 80 and space runaway ran from 80 to 81, so coming after and being created by Tomino it draw's a lot of inspiration from gundam, most predominantly one of my favorite references to gundam in ideon is in some episodes Haro make's a few cameos
Excellent review on one of the most infamous anime cartoons imaginable.
Somebody did an Ideon review! Haha. I've always wanted to watch this but I have to be in the mood to watch retro, retro.
And by the way - The guy who did the music for this show would later do the music for the Dragon Quest Games. The more you know.
Ideon: Be Invoked is not a recap. It's a continuation and ending of the series. Did you not watch it?
there are 2 movies, the movie before that recaps everything from the series before that movie so together its a recap+continuation.
BobSamurai The way you make it sound in the review is that they're both recaps. So that's what made me a little confused.
its cool, i intentionally mentioned it as an alternative for those who were curious but not dedicated enough to sit through the whole series because it is something that should be experienced and i think both movies together would work for that purpose
i agree with you, but i know there are alot of people out there that wouldnt give this a chance due to its dated animation and pacing issues. for them i would recommend the movies as a way of experiencing the basics of the story but for more dedicated anime fans id recommend to watch the whole series because some of my favorite parts are missing from the movie
You're right bob, the pacing is too slow and sometimes the episodes feels like it is repeating the same formula of cat and mouse. I feel a lot of the supporting characters were poorly developed. Luckily there is the Be Invoked movie. After watching this it really does reminds me how it really inspired the End of Eva movie. Thanks for your review. It helped to introduce this series to me. :)
Will this was a cool review i feel like i can give this series a quick look also i wonder if this would be dubbed.Thanks for sharing
I dont really think that the animation aged poorly. This quality is about the same as the original mobile suit gundam, given that ideon came out shortly after. I'm pretty sure people have a higher standard for 80's animation because Macross raised the bar.
Sunrise did draw aliens in Zambot 3 and Daitarn 3
The pacing is sooo slow. The plot barely gets anywhere for the first 10 episodes.
episode 1 *The buff clan is attacking the protagonists!*
episode 10 *The buff clan is still attacking the protagonists!*
It's also inconsistent with how strong the mech is. A tactical nuke barely scratched it but a bunch of bugs almost obliterated it.
Oh my god, Ideon, can you fucking chill?!
Damn...someone already beat me to the hair growing back joke! Surprised to know this came out in 1980, it looks really outdated even for 80's standards!
***** re: (comments section) 'Your hair grew back!' 'I ate a senzu bean.' - LOL
This anime did won awards though.
no the 2nd movie has new stuff in it a lot actually like 90% of it is the new ending
I must warn you, the Ide sees this and if it is Invoked, the first meteor has your name written on it.
How the Hell can you wear your hair after cutting it?
Does it have an English dub?
i wish
Well it did had a US Blu-Ray release last year by Maiden Japan, but no English dub included
I liked the art style and I thought Ideon had a lot of beautiful scenes but Shin-getter's release was encoded from some really bad bootleg DVDs that used an old LD master and Shin-getter themselves didn't do too swell of a job either resulting in the video being very bitrate starved, the backgrounds being absent of any detail and the colors being totally desaturated. Their translation was pretty poor as well since the "translator" only managed to haphazardly stumble through the series by some minor miracle because he found transcripts for all of the episodes at a convention. I'm not overly critical though since he (probably correctly) assumed that nobody else would ever do it and wanted to make it at least somewhat watchable for English speakers. And there still aren't any other 1980 mecha series (Baldios, God Sigma, Trider G7, Shin Tetsujin) with subtitles so I doubt you've seen any of them to really make a judgement like "dated for 1980."